Woods & Waters

January 13, 1988|By John Husar.

Indiana`s reward lottery for retrieved salmon and trout tags is Wednesday at the Michigan City armory. Ten winners will receive cash and merchandise prizes. Indiana`s Great Lakes fishery biologist Dan Brazo said 355 tags have been reported from 3,700 planted on adult fish in Trail and Salt Creeks and the Little Calumet River. ``There`s still time for anyone with a tag to turn in the information and be eligible for the drawing,`` said Brazo, who needs the data for a scientific study. . . . Brazo said sport and commercial anglers are seeing slight walleye increases, particularly near the NIPSCO hot-water discharge near Michigan City. These fish apparently are escapees from Michigan`s stocking program on the St. Joseph River.

Capt. Tony Tillett just won`t let a marlin go on North Carolina`s Outer Banks, even at the risk of a $600 rig. Dick Krieg, a Knoxville, Tenn., attorney, learned that first-hand when he nailed a large billfish the other day, and the line kept spooling out. ``I asked the mate how much line we had, and he said he`d just put on 400 yards of new line,`` Krieg told Lowell Branham of the Knoxville News-Sentinel. ``The fish continued taking line much faster than we could back the boat, and when we got down to about 100 yards left on the reel, I asked the mate what we were going to do now. He got one of the other outfits we`d been using and hooked it on the reel I was using. The fish kept right on taking out line while all this was going on. It`s really a helpless feeling to sit there and watch the line smoke off the reel and not be able to do a thing about it.

``When the line was near the bare spool, the mate just took the first rod and threw it overboard. Then he handed me the other rod and we continued to fight the fish. Finally the fish quit running, and we began to gain some line back. Before long the first rod reappeared from the water. When we got it back in the boat, I took it, and we unhooked the other rig so I could fight the fish with the original rod and reel. All this used up about 20 minutes, I suppose. I continued to recover line, but after I got about 200 yards of it back on the reel, the fish sounded, and I couldn`t do a thing with him. For the next 30 minutes, we just see-sawed back and forth-gain a little and then lose a little.

``Finally the fish came back up to the surface and jumped a few more times. While it was up, we were able to get the remaining line back and bring the fish to the boat. The whole process took about an hour, I guess. Capt. Tillett told me this was the third time he`d used the tactic of throwing a rod and reel overboard to keep a fish from running out all the line and breaking off. The other two times he tried it, he lost not only the fish but also his outfit. When you consider that he was throwing about $600 worth of equipment into the ocean each time he did that, you can see to what lengths he`s willing to go to try to please a client.`` The marlin turned out to be a 9-footer weighing about 400 pounds, presumably an impressive trophy. ``Well, no,``

Krieg said. ``After we got it to the boat and looked it over, we let it go.``